ad countersigned what
was a lie, in a royal patent appointing a certain Indian judge. The
'lie' consisted in reciting that a judge then holding the post had
resigned, whereas he had not resigned, and the correct phrase was that
the Queen had permitted him to retire. Lord George Bentinck, whose rage
was then at its fiercest, pricked up his ears, and a day or two later
declared that Mr. Secretary Gladstone had 'deliberately affirmed, not
through any oversight or inadvertence or thoughtlessness, but designedly
and of his own malice prepense, that which in his heart he knew not to
be true.' Things of this sort may either be passed over in disdain, or
taken with logician's severity. Mr. Gladstone might well have contented
himself with the defence that his signature had been purely formal, and
that every secretary of state is called upon to put his name to recitals
of minute technical fact which he must take on trust from his officials.
As it was, he chose to take Bentinck's reckless aspersion at its
highest, and the combat lasted for weeks and months. Bentinck got up the
case with his usual industrious tenacity; he insisted that the Queen's
name stood at that moment in the degrading position of being prefixed to
a proclamation that all her subjects knew to recite and to be founded
upon falsehood; he declared that the whole business was a job
perpetrated by the outgoing ministers, to fill up a post that was not
vacant; he imputed no corrupt motive to Mr. Gladstone; he admitted that
Mr. Gladstone was free from the betrayal and treachery practised by his
political friends; but he could not acquit him of having been in this
particular affair the tool and the catspaw of two old foxes greedier and
craftier than himself. To all this unmannerly stuff the recipient of it
only replied by holding its author the more tight to the point of the
original offence; the blood of his highland ancestors was up, and the
poet's contest between eagle and serpent was not more dire. The affair
was submitted to Lord Stanley. He reluctantly consented (Oct. 29) to
decide the single question whether Bentinck was justified 'on the
information before him in using the language quoted.' There was a
dispute what information Bentinck had before him, and upon this point,
where Bentinck's course might in his own polite vocabulary be marked as
pure shuffling, Lord Stanley returned the papers (Feb. 8, 1847) and
expressed his deep regret that he could bring about no